A Hall of Fame Scrap Scandal
November 12, 2007 by Christine Gooding
Filed under Home & Living
Wow, this is BIG news…whenever I think about Scrapbooking, I get this warm fuzzy feeling but I didn’t realise that like all other aspects of life, there still a bit of gossip scandal here and there!
Newsweek reports
Outraged scrapbookers recently forced the industry’s top magazine, Creating Keepsakes, to strip a New York woman of its coveted Hall of Fame title after readers noticed a photo credit on one of her layouts. The rules require all entries to be the “sole work” of contestants. But while Kristina Contes admits that she made a mistake, she blames “petty, jealous women” for bullying contest officials into disqualifying her work. “I mean, it’s not like I stole someone’s boyfriend,” says the 28-year-old restaurateur. “This isn’t high school.”
But it is a cutthroat business. Scrappers spent $2.6 billion on supplies last year, according to the Craft & Hobby Association, and one in four households contains a scrapbooker, making it more popular than golf. The Hall of Fame award can bring celebrity status, TV appearances and teaching jobs. After Contes declined to return her title voluntarily, irate hobbyists smeared her on blogs and threatened to flood her restaurant with fake reservations. “The b–––h doesn’t have a moral bone in her body,” wrote a commenter on the Scrap Smack blog. Over on the Creating Keepsakes Web site, angry readers cried cover-up and threatened boycotts when editors deleted unkind comments about the company from the site’s discussion boards. “I wanted an explanation,” says Noell Hyman, who was among the first to question Contes’s work. She got more than that: Contes and another woman whose work was questioned have been replaced in the 25-member Hall of Fame class for 2007. “Women prove time and again that they are ridiculous, vile creatures,” says Contes. She plans to retreat from the scissors-and-glue game—but she’ll always have the memories.
COME on LADIES its not like we all havent made mistkes .We all know what we can and can’t do now so lets
move on . I have seen some pretty auwsome pages out there .lets not reduce ourselves to calling each other
names.i my selph used a baby angle ,i made stamps and used it for photo corners .didn’t think any thing about it untill my friend said something.
have a great day ladies.
Sole work, eh? Does that mean the hall of famers should be making their own paper, embellishments, stickers and adhesives too? Get real people! If the pages created are awesome and they aren’t a complete rip off of someone else’s work, who cares? Isn’t the whole point to inspire others to create? It’s a shame to see such behavior.
What Newsweek reported was only the tip of the scandal. Several online sites and blogs have been hashing it blow by blow. Many are no longer going to renew their subscriptions as the CK magazine has been sold and has changed (did you see the first new issue?) The people in forums were having their posts deleted etc. It was not good and the Newsweek article really just glossed it over. I never would submit anything to any of the craft rags. Many submitters scrap just for that and cutthroat is right. Not worth the scrutiny or the non-existent integrity of the editorial staffs.
I forgot one thing-one other woman voluntarily withdrew her items when the stuff broke about the other woman, who was published in the annual issue. So there were at least two cheaters. I wonder if either would have said anything had the other kept quiet?
I think this is sad – on a lot of levels. I was part of a scrapping group for a while and there were some extremely spiteful people in it. They would snipe about people when they didn’t show up for scrap night and some of them actually lashed out at others over silly stuff. It caused the group to split. This reminds me of that…I guess its like junior high/high school all over again – Mean Girls wasn’t just a movie!